9fans archive / 1994 / 05 / 4 /    prev next

From: Scott Schwartz schwartz@gro...
Subject: expecting more from errstr
Date: Fri, 6 May 1994 20:32:19 -0400

Emboldened by the favorable reply to my last query, here is 
another:

One annoying thing in Unix is when you say something like
open("/no/such/directory/or/file",0), it tells you that it something
doesn't exist, but doesn't say what, which sometimes makes for
uninformative error messages.  Now that we have errstr, instead of just
errno, it would be delightful if it would encode something about
what went wrong, so that perror could say something like
	open: failed because directory 'such' does not exist